Of Quantity and Quality II: Holocaust, torture and sacrament
I’d like to return at this point to a quote I’ve used here before, and find very insightful. It’s from Lin Jensen, An Ear to the Ground: Uncovering the living source of Zen ethics, and it tells us:
Judgments on right and wrong are a nearly irresistible enticement to pick sides. And that’s exactly why the old Zen masters warned against becoming a person of right and wrong. It isn’t that the masters were indifferent to questions of ethics, but for them ethical conduct went beyond simply taking the prescribed right side. For these masters, the source of ethical conduct is found in the way things are, circumstance itself: unfiltered immediate reality reveals what is needed.
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In closing, I would like to return to the issue of torture, and to offer you another quote, this one from one of the most powerful works of theology known to me, William T Cavanaugh‘s Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics and the Body of Christ:
by making the seeking of important answers seem like the motive for the torture, the torturer seems able to justify his brutality. No one would think of defending the sheer physical act of torture, the merciless inflicting of pain on a helpless victim. However, once we consider the verbal aspect, the question and answer which seem of such great urgency, the moral contours of torture seem less clear, and utilitarian justifications of torture become thinkable, provided the motive for the questions is of sufficient importance.
Cavanaugh is writing about those who were “disappeared” in Pinochet‘s Chile, and his broader argument is that torture is the antithesis of the sacramental nature of human identity — and here we return full circle to the “image and likeness” of the divine in the mortal, the human.
The deeper we can penetrate into the central mystery, it seems to me, the better we will be enabled to love, to understand, and to forgive.
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J. Scott Shipman:
April 20th, 2012 at 1:06 am
Hi Charles,
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Powerful post. Not sure I’d agree with the Jensen quote. My philosophy is a little rusty, but if memory serves, our modern concept of moral relativism (which is how this reads) was shaped by Proust and Freud (and, I confess, I’m many years from both—whom I found tedious, btw—Proust, in particular). Is there a place for timeless principles which are portable through the ages? I believe I know the answer, for I see moral relativism and situational ethics to be a contributing factor to the decay of Western culture.
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Big thought, but first thing that came to mind when I read this extraordinary post.
J.ScottShipman:
April 20th, 2012 at 2:25 am
As an aside, there is a little book written by J.M. Powis Smith (in the 30’s) called The Origins and History of the Hebrew Law—-he compares Mosaic law (from which most Western law descends) to the Code of Hammurabi. There was one quote that jumped off the page:
It is the balance, the harmony, if you will, that determines longevity?
Madhu:
April 22nd, 2012 at 2:53 pm
“The mind is struck dumb.”
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Yes. Impossible to comprehend.
Madhu:
April 22nd, 2012 at 2:59 pm
I want to be John Kiriakou, but I know I would be Reuel Marc Gerecht.
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Meaning: The reason people use the “ticking time bomb” scenario for discussion, I think, is that it highlights that a moral society, and the rule of law, understand the exceptional and will sometimes allow for it, however terrible.
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So, where is the line between that which should be understood as an exception and that which we codify with our laws? I don’t have the answers. And this aspect of your post absolutely fits in with the following at SWJ:
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http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/this-week-at-war-the-generals-dystopia-0
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Order/disorder, risk/non-risk. How do we think about it?
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I wanted to add something to my first comment and didn’t. It was this: as a high school student, I believe, I watched a film in school about the Holocaust and I vaguely–and very imperfectly–remember seeing a scene in which babies were sorted through, “as if they were cabbages, not human beings.” I remember the image, I remember the shock, I remember the very phrase that came to mind, but I can’t remember the exact incident it referred to. It has always stayed with me, that image. I cannot forget it.